The effects of advertising on our fragile minds

How does being constantly exposed to advertisements affect us?

Advertising is a discipline that draws on the knowledge of social psychology applied to marketing and tries to direct every purchase decision we make. Closely linked to studies of influence and persuasion, it manages to modify our habits, becoming a phenomenon that transcends the mere act of buying and selling.

The language it uses and the reality it shows us seek to respond to the desires, needs and motivations of an audience that does not usually recognize itself as such.

Advertising is omnipresent

Guérin is blunt when he states that "the air we breathe is composed of oxygen, nitrogen and advertising". Advertising is omnipresent. 

It invades all spaces, settles in our homes, sneaks into our electronic devices, fills social networks and mass media. It manages to drive our conversations and our thoughts, we reproduce its slogans and slogans and hum its tunes. It plays a leading role in our external reality and our inner world.

Advertising as an agent of social modeling

Sociology affirms that advertising is an agent of social modeling because, in addition to influencing purchasing habits, it accelerates the transmission of attitudes and behaviors, it accelerates the transmission of attitudes and values and can even transform them.. It transmits a hegemonic discourse, it manufactures a certain reality, a perception that will end up shaping our symbolic thinking and also our desires (Romero, 2011).

However, the vast majority of us will hardly admit to being influenced by advertising.. "There are as few people who admit the influence of advertising on their buying habits as there are madmen who admit their madness" (Pérez and San Martín, 1995). Psychology shows us repeatedly that we are wrong if we believe we are free from its influence.

Advertising illusionism

In the game of seduction, the advertiser has the upper hand. He knows the frustrations, prejudices and intimate longings of his target and turns them into the perfect packaging for a product that will supposedly solve any weakness of his client. In this way, advertising not only informs about the qualities that the product possesses, but endows it with additional values that are not even part of it. It is a kind of illusionist art, capable of covering the product with a black light that hides or lets you see what the advertiser wants to show, not what really exists.

Advertising plays a substitutive role when it interchanges symbol and product, making the consumer desire the symbol more strongly than the product he thinks he needs.... by making the consumer desire the symbol more strongly than the product itself, which he thinks he needs.. It is a fetishistic behavior associated with the need for distinction, status and recognition that all humans have. The cosmetics manufacturer, Charles Revlon, defined this substitution effect perfectly when he stated: "in our factory we make lipsticks, in our advertisements we sell hope" (Ibidem).

Advertising is classist

Advertising appeals to class consciousness with its strategies. Each advertisement is directed to a specific target audience or sector of society. Each object is endowed with a symbolic value that serves to create in the consumer an illusion of social ascent if he or she possesses it. At the same time, advertising tries to avoid in its stories scenes that show class division or social conflicts, while forcing a fictitious social equality by creating products for any purchasing power (Romero, 2011), categorizing types of consumers and satisfying them with products adapted to each target.

Advertising also has a problem-eliminating function, or "brave new world" effect. It always tries to present a beautiful, playful and fascinating world, in which consumption is related to leisure, beauty and wellbeing, i.e., it presents us with a "beautiful side of life" obviating any other less appealing reality, de-dramatizing our daily life.

Knowing it to prevent its effects

In addition to its economic value, we can see how advertising has a remarkable social value.. It is positive to learn to recognize its various values in order to avoid possible harmful effects. For example, learning to detect when it may be used as a means of ideological pressure, or to recognize its classist capacity when it categorizes us according to different types of consumption. Many researchers argue that advertising is alienating because it alienates us by creating new needs, or when it digests a certain vision of the world.

Advertising stereotypes and uniforms us by proposing models and fashions that we will massively follow, equalizing our criteria, ideals and tastes.ideals and tastes. This is the depersonalizing effect of advertising, which homogenizes a society that pretends to be plural but, paradoxically, will take advantage of this unification to try, once again, to locate products that seek to provide the buyer with distinction and uniqueness, because we all like to be special (Carnegie, 1936). In this way it makes us enter a spiral of depersonalization-distinction from which it is difficult to escape in the consumer market in which we live.

"To advertise is to poke at open wounds (...). You mention the defects and we act on each one of them. We play on every emotion and every problem, from not being able to stay ahead, to the desire to be one more in the crowd. Each one has a special desire" (Della Femina, quoted in Pérez and San Martín, 1995).Bibliographical references:

• Carnegie, D. (1936). How to win friends and influence people. USA: Simon & Schuster

• Pérez, J.M., San Martín, J. (1995). Selling more than just jeans. Advertising and education in values. Comunicar (5) 21-28.

• Romero, M.V. (2011). The language of advertising. The permanent seduction. Spain: Ariel.